Night Watch

Interesting ideas and the layout works well for the game. I do wish that the cards had attack and defense instead of seemingly just hitting for 1 dmg unless they're weak to whatever they're being attacked with. Fun game overall though!

Interesting. I love the concept of using cards for a tower defense style game.

Really fun game! What text did you use with stable diffusion to generate the images

Thanks @enver-arco, my prompts were pretty descriptive, anywhere from 20 to 50 words each.
Objects that the AI has seen a lot (e.g. people, some animals, photos of real world) are easier to describe with less words, and objects that were likely scarce in the training dataset (e.g. a rustic pit trap in the woods with sharp spikes at the bottom) take a lot more words and attempts to define for the AI (and I was still not satisfied with some of them).

Probably close to half of the text within my prompts was description of content (e.g. feral vicious wolf sharp teeth in the misty woods at night with heavy rain) and half was description of style (e.g. realistic, concept art, volumetric light, etc.).
A few words that I found were important: beautiful, realistic, fantasy, concept art, digital illustration, portrait, videogame asset, digital icon, volumetric light, 3d render, photo, highly detailed, masterpiece, seamless texture.

For all the icons, using "videogame asset" helps a lot, but if I used that in the characters it made them worse. For the backgrounds and spike trap, using "photo" and even terms like "200 mm" helped a lot to bring them closer to what I was looking for. Typing "portrait" instantly makes faces and characters more beautiful, but does not help if you are trying to get a full body. For characters, depending on what I was getting I had to add or remove things like "fantasy, "realistic", "beautiful".

Img2img helped a lot, especially with the card frames. I drew the rough shapes for them in MS Paint and then SD respected my dimensions and direction almost perfectly, I was very impressed with the power of that tool.

Most images took a lot of attempts, I'd say 20-ish generations, some tweaking in GIMP, taking a total of probably a half-hour or so to finalize each. Sorry I rambled a bit :sweat_smile:

Awesome, the results are great! I used ai generated art for my game too and likewise it took about 20ish generations to get something good but it still saved so much time.

Really interesting idea! Never seen a tower defence card game before, love it. Took a little bit to figure out what was going on but all around good job!

Very fun idea! I actually finished the game twice and wish it lasted longer! Would be nice to see how long before the current turn ends. Well done!

@sirdorius thanks I appreciate it!

Nice auto strategic game with card driven elements. The rule is simple and well designed.

What a solid concept! And impressive for a game jam! At first, it felt really slow, and I was impatient to only get one gold per day. However, that pacing ultimately gave the game some tension, so I think it's a net positive. I think an icon key for reference would be a benefit, as would a more dynamic indicator of the day/night cycle (like a little Minecraft-style clock perhaps?), and it could have used some audio to enhance the experience.

My first attempt had me scratching my head a bit, but winning made me want more, so well done on that front! I hope you consider developing this further.

Thank you @carrotvan and @ynthamy, I'm considering developing this game further! Not sure yet but we'll see.

Such a great idea for a game. I really like the core mechanic. I can see this being a longer game with lots more cool strategies to try. Nice job, really clever concept

Fantastic game idea that unfortunately suffered pacing issues due to the use of the 10 second theme. Reminds me heavily of Plants vs Zombies! I loved the mechanics but just got bored and frustrated waiting for the night and day cycle to tick over. I also think a togglable legend would go a long way to help new players understand the mechanics. You should definitely consider taking this concept further, I could see it doing very well on mobile (particularly with PvP). Great work!

I was curious how AI art would impact this Jam and this was definitely a solid justification for including it. Using cards as a defensive mechanic is pretty neat. Would definitely be the type of game I'd grab a final version of.

Nice idea. Would be interesting to see how an endless gamemode where you just have to survive for as long as possible would work. Also interactions between cards (e.g. adjacent or same row/column) might be fun.

Interesting. I think The game would need some kind of splash damage or acceleration cards (more gold) like sunflowers on plants vs zombi so you can modulate your strategy. The scouting mechanic works really good here. The theme constrain is not very pleasing here, but a lot of games ( including mine ) have to deal with this problem.

some amazing ai art, felt like i was using old magic cards while playing, the day and night cycle for when you can lay down cards is a great idea and fun to play with

Thanks for your feedback @benjamin, yes I've got lots of crazy ideas for new cards! I agree that the 10 second timer is not so pleasing here and I'm considering removing it in a post-LD version.

@misfire-dev I appreciate it! I'm glad you liked the art, "old magic" is exactly the vibe I was hoping for!

I love a good card game, and this is definitely a fresh take. I like how you expanded on the simple idea by adding attack types and enemy weaknesses. I do think that generating coins every 10 seconds is a bit limiting, so perhaps generating coins via killing wilderness enemies and/or playing specific cards would be nice.

Great job overall; very fun.

It looks wonderfully done but I had a difficult time figuring out what I was suppose to be doing. Once I did I found it to be entertaining. Nice entry and I like the idea of using AI for art assets, personally I think you could allow voting for that but maybe the rules say differently?

Thank you lots @simplepotential I do have a tutorial planned for a future version. I'm glad you got it and enjoyed your time. Regarding art, I believe the latest rules suggest we opt out if the majority of the assets are AI generated.

this game has a nice potential. i hope in the future you'll add some ranks/upgrades to the cards. but this is a really nice jam entry! i liked the fact that some units can only be placed at day or at night. the reveal mechanism adds something too. congrats!